Did Life Begin On Comets?

New Scientist ^ | 8-17-2007 | HazelMuir

[RightWhale]

It need not be a question of design versus randomness. Other possibilities would include a kind of musical analogy of the nature that produces the limited varities of elementary particles, chemical elements, and chemical compounds. That is, only certain combinations are stable enough to stick. When extended to life forms it is called organicism.

[atlaw]

Yes, it is. Considering this is the main reason why evolutionists and creationists have spent the last few decades beating each other over the head.

Actually, creationists just kept backing up their objections to the theory of evolution until they finally seized on abiogenesis (which the theory of evolution has never addressed) as some sort of reason why the theory is flawed. But it's rather like objecting to meteorological theories because they don't address the genesis of the first water molecule.

It makes sense if you do not believe in God or intelligent design to extend evolution into somehow randomly creating the DNA molecule out of liquid soup which then happily spits out a human being a few billion years later through the process of evolution.

No, it doesn't make sense. You aren't "extending evolution" by conflating it with biogenesis theories, you are simply distorting it. Evolution is what happens when self-replicators are present. How the replicators got here in the first place is interesting, but no more necessary to evolutionary theory than the genesis of water molecules is to meteorological theory.

That was what I was taught in school growing up.

I keep hearing about these mysterious schools that conflated abiogenesis with evolution in the distant past. I'm rather up there in years, and I can't recall anything of the sort. If you were truly taught this, you were taught wrong. Happens sometimes. But your mis-education has no bearing on the science itself.

[Gen-X-Dad]

That was what I was taught in school growing up.

I keep hearing about these mysterious schools that conflated abiogenesis with evolution in the distant past. I'm rather up there in years, and I can't recall anything of the sort. If you were truly taught this, you were taught wrong. Happens sometimes. But your mis-education has no bearing on the science itself.

------

Okay, I take your word for the biological viewpoint that I may be mixing semantics. I also think your mis-education statement is somewhat selective memory as every school child who attended public school in the 70's and 80's (and probably even today) was told that single cells led to fish which led to land animals which led to monkeys which led to man. They taught that as evolution. People today drive around in cars with little fish with feet that say "Darwin" attached to their car. It has been pounded into our brains that evolution starts with a single cell organism that started in an ocean way back in time. Where the single cell came from may technically not be evolution, but it was sure sold as a factual starting point in the process of evolution in the standard science class. If evolutionist have given up their starting point of their theory, after all these years, I am not aware of it.

The point I am making is that modern science cannot explain where the single cell organism came from. They have failed to reproduce it under idea laboratory conditions and it doesn't pass scientific scrutiny as far as the mathematics of probability theory or the physics of thermodynamics. In my opinion, biologists continue to happily ignore the mathematics and physics discussion or attempt to redirect it. That is the part that wasn't covered in my mis-education that is a key part to the ongoing debate on this topic.

[SunkenCiv]

from August.

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